Freddie,
Good question that I am sure many people are asking. Whether the unusual cold we have seen here has anything to do with ‘global warming’ or not is not clear. Some scientists suggest that the changing conditions in the Arctic and especially the dramatic reduction in sea-ice this region has seen over the last 30 years could be causing this, by changing large-scale pressure patterns and wind fields know as the Arctic Oscillation.

It’s too early to tell whether this hypothesis is correct or not, but it serves as a useful reminder that anthropogenic climate change (‘global warming’) does not imply that temperatures go up everywhere all the time. Global warming simply means that temperatures are increasing in the long-term, when averaged over the entire globe, but you can always find places with extreme cold (or hot for that matter) weather in some part of the globe.

It is also interesting to note that while temperatures have been very cold in the eastern US, a few hundred miles to the north they have been at record highs. If you were to ask a person living in northeastern Canada or in southern Greenland how they perceive the weather over the last 2 months, they would tell you that temperatures have been extremely warm. Take a look at last months temperatures (December 2010) in the Figure posted by Kevin. It nicely shows this temperature anomaly over eastern North America. So our own local short-term perspective on weather, while interesting, is not a useful guide to draw any conclusions about long-term, global climate change.

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